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Flash Memory to Rival Hard Drives
Skal Tura writes "Samsung will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year, nudging the memory technology towards use in notebook PCs and maybe even edging out hard drives in some products in the next few years."
Some more information about the NAND flash memory can be found here.
One nice thing about this article is that it clearly explains the difference between a gigabit (Gb) and a gigabyte (GB)...something the article referenced in the story seems confused about.
From the article referenced in the story:
And from the article referenced above:
Sorry to be picky, but I'm a stickler for detail.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Seems like they're playing fast and loose with capacity: "will start producing 16 gigabit Nand Flash chips this year" vs. " currently in products such as USB drives and digital cameras in capacities of up to 8GB." Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't 16 gigabits = 2GB?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
There are linux distros that happily run on flash. Damn Small Linux comes first to mind. It's possible, in fact many people have done it, to build a computer with no hard drive; just flash.
The current problem is that you get only a limited number of writes to flash. TFA doesn't mention that. It is a problem but not an insurmountable one.
Good job Samsung. I've got to NAND it to you...
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
Hard disks may be physically larger and slower for random access, but they are faster than Flash for large sequential reads, much in the same way that the hare is faster than the turtle in that old fable.
We'll most likely see Flash storage grow in cell phones and PDAs, not in notebook computers. If you were a pilot, you wouldn't just have the mechanic swap out the propeller for a Rolls Royce jet engine. You'd want the whole plane overhauled to handle the increased stress on it. Better to have a system designed from the ground up that could handle the new engine rather than try to bolt it onto an older, proven design.
I, for one, welcome... oh never mind.
As flash drives become more and more popular, more dollars will pour into flash research and development. And applications will learn to accomodate the strengths and weaknesses of flash. I think we'll be seeing some really neat things over the next 10 years. Terabyte flash drive, anyone?
...just my 2 gil.
It's not like it's something new and completely unproven. Solid-state disks (SSDs) have been used for years in server-applications, especially for large databases, where the speed of harddisks or RAID just won't cut it. This is an expensive solution, but if you have gazillions of transactions (think mastercard), it might still be cheaper than more traditional solutions (add more servers, add more disk-cache, make sure things don't fail).
Given that it has worked pretty well at both the server-side as well as in gadgets and appliances, I'd say flash-memory notebooks are going to happen pretty soon. It's just a matter of hitting the right pricepoint. Today you can (theoretically) get a 2GB SSD for the same price as a 200GB HD. This is pretty uncool, although I would believe many enthusiasts would buy it, if there were producers of cheap SSDs (today only high-end SSDs exist).
But if you could get a 20GB SSD for the same price as 200GB HD (which is a sane estimate, given the article), things start to make sense. It would be enough for running MS office on a laptop, and seriously reduce startup-time, as well as battery usage. Given it's performance, it would also be a great add-on for desktop computers (put the OS, most used applications, and swap-space on it, and use traditional harddisks for your videos/music/porn).
Flashdisks are much more reliable then any conventional harddrive. They claim >5,000,000 write/erase cycles and unlimited reads. Unites States defence department is using them for reliability issue alone.
C SIFFD/IDESCSIFFD
M-Systems (top flash disk producer) states this:
(copied from the website)
Top Reliability & Endurance
** 99.999% reliability
** >1,400,000 hours of actual (in the field) MTBF
** Embedded EDC/ECC, based on BCH Algorithm
** Data integrity under power-cycling
** TrueFFS® technology: bad blocks mapping-out and dynamic wear-leveling algorithms
** >5,000,000 Write/Erase cycles; Read unlimited
5-year warranty
Source link:
http://www.m-systems.com/site/en-US/Products/IDES
No moving parts = no noise.
No moving parts = tough.
No activity when quiescent - no heat.
I, for one, welcome our new NAND overlords
"Cats like plain crisps"
Newegg, Maxtor 300 GIGABYTE sata $125. Available NOW.
Vapordeals, Mysterymem, 16GB(?) $90. Available ???
What's the R/W speed of these things? What's the R/W burnout on these?
How many writes will they take before they fail?
Maxtor is claiming a 1 million MTBF / 5 year warranty on their 300gb drive.
No way in hell flash or any other memory is every going to compete with that,
not in price, performance, capacity or endurance.
Hard drives are so big and so cheap now that they are cheaper than blank DVD media. You're better off to archive to big drives then store them in fireproof safes than ANY other backup method. I have harddrives from the 80's that STILL have data on them that I can STILL retrieve and use, right now and I've made no serious effort to be overly protective of the drives. In other words, they've been kicking around the house in boxes on the floor. And they are still good. 20+ years later.
Flash memory may have an indefinite SHELF lifespan but you can only write to them X number of times before they fail and they are slow.
Someone is trying to sell the neophytes a bill of goods.
When Vista releases there is going to be a rush to sell more silly crap to people. More upgrades.. Oh boy..
In the meantime, I'll make due with my current system and my Linux.
And as hard drives continue to get bigger and faster and cheaper I'll just add em as I need em.
MTBF isn't absolute. It's a statistical estimate. A hard drive may have a 500,000 hour MTBF. That particular model of drive wasn't tested for 57 years to see if it failed.
Any type of failure rate is also representive of the collection of all products being tested, not a single one.
Read the Failure Rate Wiki entry for more information.
I did a study which estimates that flash will surpass 3.5 inch IDEs in every price by 2017.k .html
Read about it here:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashvsharddis
Nice rant but you totally mised the point.
A 300 Gig IDE drive doesnt fit in a laptop.
A 300 Gig IDE drive uses loads of power.
A 300 Gig IDE drive has faster sustained transfer speed but much a longer access times than flash. Horses for courses.
Wear leveling algorithms can make the write limit of flash irrelevant.
That the interface (eg, ATA) for accessing storage media usually goes out of date before the media wears out is true for both disks and flash.
The real story here is that flash is trouncing disk in improvements in Megs per $ and will one day catch up to and overtake disk. And it will be sooner than mmost people expect.
That's 100k per block, not for the entire drive. The wear-leveling algorithms will make sure that even if you constantly re-write the same file, that part of the memory won't get worn out.
With a 512-byte erase block size, that is 419 billion writes. With a 4K erase block size, that's 52 billion writes. Use a 20GB drive instead of 2GB, and you'll get 10x the writes. And, the computer can warn you before the memory stops re-writing.
5 trillion writes is 10,000 writes/second for 13 years.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
NOR flash is extremely slow for writes. This Samsung appnoteo ry/appnote/onenand_features_performance_051104.pdf
http://www.samsung.com/Products/Semiconductor/Mem
compares I/O performance of the various technologies (the chart is on page 28, so scroll down...)
For their test rig, NAND flash yields 8.8MB/sec writes vs NOR at 0.14MB/sec. That's why NOR flash is only used for BIOS memory and other things you don't have to rewrite very often. On the flip side, NAND flash gets reads at 16.5MB/sec vs NOR at 23.9MB/sec (or 108MB/sec, presumably in some kind of burst mode - that part isn't explained).
If their OneNAND performs as well as they claim, I could see using it for a boot drive; 68MB/sec read would be fine there, 9.3MB/sec write would be ok as long as you weren't paging to it or doing much of anything else. Linux would run pretty well with those parameters, its buffer cache is good at absorbing and deferring writes; Windows 2K/XP's memory manager/cache manager purges pages too aggressively though, which would make the write throughput a serious system bottleneck.
-- *My* journal is more interesting than *yours*...
'' MTBF isn't absolute. It's a statistical estimate. A hard drive may have a 500,000 hour MTBF. That particular model of drive wasn't tested for 57 years to see if it failed. ''
Also important: Products like harddisk have a limited life. That harddisk with 500,000 hour MTBF will wear out after five years or 50,000 hours; no way will it last 500,000 hours. The MTBF only means: If you buy 500 harddisks and run them for 1000 hours, you can expect one to fail.